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We analyzed 425k favicons

iconmap.io

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Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#21

Post by paxys »

ryan29 wrote: post #17

> In fact, I recommend that browsers ignore these hints because they are wrong much of the time. I don't agree. That's the kind of coddling that encourages incompetence. Instead of compensating for others' mistakes, just let their stuff break. I wonder if Safai on iOS ignores the hints. When I tested, I was surprised to see that pressing the share icon, which holds the option for `Add to Home Screen`, would cause a d…

Browsers ignore the hints because they aren't needed. The image file itself has everything you need for rendering it.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#22

Post by ChrisArchitect »

What is the Tranco dataset that this is based on? I mean come on -- anything that claims to be based on 'Alexa' (or any of these others: Cisco Umbrella/openDNS? Majestic? Quantcast?) is sooo suspect. None of these sources are that good and especially Alexa which harks back to a time 20 years ago of browser toolbars and extensions which the large majority do not use anymore.

Just saying yes maybe it's easy to come up with a top 1000 list of sites on the net, but other than that no one really knows unless you're like Google/Bing/Apple/Cloudflare that have redirection urls/DNS control, tracking clicks etc

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#23

Post by yboris »

oehpr wrote: post #5
gurgeous wrote: post #2

Also see the gigantic map - https://iconmap.io The blog post is the analysis of the data set, the map is the visualization.

I wonder if there might be a way to map all these using t-SNE to discrete grid locations? Maybe even an autoencoder. I'd love to see what features it could pick out. I don't see their data set though. hmmm. maybe I'll just have to crawl it on my own if I want to do it.

side note: instead of t-SNE consider UMAP - provides better results (and it's much faster) https://github.com/lmcinnes/umap

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#24

Post by tweakimp »

tinco wrote: post #16

Not really relevant, but using Go to fetch the data, and then Ruby to process the data is the best. I used this exact set up for a project and it was amazing. Really the sweet spot of use cases for both languages.

Can you please explain why they are the best languages for these jobs?

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#25

Post by malfist »

ryan29 wrote: post #17

> In fact, I recommend that browsers ignore these hints because they are wrong much of the time. I don't agree. That's the kind of coddling that encourages incompetence. Instead of compensating for others' mistakes, just let their stuff break. I wonder if Safai on iOS ignores the hints. When I tested, I was surprised to see that pressing the share icon, which holds the option for `Add to Home Screen`, would cause a d…

People make mistakes all the time. Breaking because somebody made a mistake that you can correct for just leads to unnecessarily fragile code.

What's the point of failing and breaking stuff if someone tells you their image is 144x144 but it's really 145x145? Who does that benefit?

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#26

Post by arp242 »

I got mine down to 160 bytes with some pixel tweaking and converting it to a 16-color indexed PNG. It's not a lot of work or very difficult (I'm an idiot at graphics editing), but you do need to spend the (small amount of) effort. I embed it as a data URI and it's just four lines of (col-80 wrapped) base64 text, which seems reasonable to me.

Haven't managed to get my headshot down to less than 10k without looking horrible no matter how much I tweaked the JPEG or WebP settings, and thought that was just a tad too big to embed. Maybe I need to find a different picture that compresses better.

I got that 280k Discord favicon down to just 24K simply by opening it in GIMP and saving it again. I got it down to 12K by indexing it to 255 colours rather than using RGB (I can't tell the difference even at full size). You can probably make it even smaller if you tried, but that's diminishing returns. Still, I bet with 5 more minutes you can get it to ~5k or so.

It's very easy; you just need to care. Does it matter? Well, when I used Slack I regularly spent a minute waiting for them to push their >10M updates, so I'd say that 250k here and 250k there etc. adds up and matters, giving real actual improvements to your customers.

The Event Horizon Telescope having a huge favicon I can understand; probably just some astronomer who uploaded it in WordPress or something. Arguably a fault of the software for not dealing with that more sensibly, but these sort of oversights happen. A tech company making custom software for a living is quite frankly just embarrassing to the entire industry. It's a big fat "fuck you" to anyone from less developed areas with less-than-ideal internet connections.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#28

Post by Conlectus »

ryan29 wrote: post #17

> In fact, I recommend that browsers ignore these hints because they are wrong much of the time. I don't agree. That's the kind of coddling that encourages incompetence. Instead of compensating for others' mistakes, just let their stuff break. I wonder if Safai on iOS ignores the hints. When I tested, I was surprised to see that pressing the share icon, which holds the option for `Add to Home Screen`, would cause a d…

A problem with this is that when a website breaks in one browser, but works in another, I imagine most people's reaction would be to blame the browser. This leads to a kind of race-to-the-bottom for browser compatibility. See for example the history of User-Agent strings.

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#29

Post by anyfoo »

... and wrote an interesting technical article about it, that even someone like me, who doesn't do web development, enjoys reading. Definitely why I come to HN (no sarcasm, it is).

Re: We analyzed 425k favicons

#30

Post by iudqnolq »

ryan29 wrote: post #17

> In fact, I recommend that browsers ignore these hints because they are wrong much of the time. I don't agree. That's the kind of coddling that encourages incompetence. Instead of compensating for others' mistakes, just let their stuff break. I wonder if Safai on iOS ignores the hints. When I tested, I was surprised to see that pressing the share icon, which holds the option for `Add to Home Screen`, would cause a d…

YouTube and Twitter both have wrong parameters. Presumably this means all major browsers ignore them or someone would have noticed their favicons not displaying right?
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